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couplet

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couplet

In literature, a pair of lines of verse, which usually rhyme and are of the same length.

The heroic couplet, consisting of two rhymed lines in iambic pentameter, was widely adopted for epic poetry, and was a convention of both serious and mock-heroic 18th-century English poetry, as in the work of Alexander Pope. An example, from Pope's ‘An Essay on Criticism’, is: ‘A little learning is a dang'rous thing;/Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.’

couplet

A verse or stanza in a poem. In music, a strophic song, generally of a light and often of a humorous type, in which the same music recurs for each verse. Also the forerunner of the episode in the rondo form, occurring in the French rondeau as cultivated by Couperin and others, where a main theme returns again and again after statements of various couplets between.


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? Mentioned in ? References in classic literature
 
But a correct sonnet ought not to end with a couplet, that is two riming lines.
Even so, several of them do not really belong to the series; composed in stanza forms, they are selected from his earlier poems and here pressed into service, and on the average they are less excellent than those which he wrote for their present places (in the rimed pentameter couplet that he adopted from the French).
So it was strange to me to discover presently that he had not been thinking of me at all, but of his own young days, when that couplet sang in his head, and he, too, had thirsted to set off for Grub Street, but was afraid, and while he hesitated old age came, and then Death, and found him grasping a box-iron.
 
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